Tracking COVID-19

Data available through: 2020-05-11

US Charts

This data is downloaded directly from the European CDC. This data requires formating the dates and calculating the cumulative totals. If you want to the data already ‘cleaned/wrangled’, you can take it from Our World in Data who gets their data from the Eurpoean CDC. They file can be found here and is called full_data.csv; also called “All four metrics”.

This data is from the ECDC and thus updated based on Eurpoean time zone days. Because of this the datas and values do not match up with the American CDC values. However, I am sticking with the EDC data set as it is available for download; where the CDC data is not.

One important calculation is the growth rate. The growth rate is calculated as follows:

\[ \text{Growth Rate} = \frac{ \text{New-Cases}_N}{\text{New-Cases}_{N-1}} \] where \(N\) is a given day. If the growth rate is below 1 that means the number of new cases is slowing down - this is a positive sign.

I also wanted to look at the dealth percentage which I calculated as the total number of dealths divided by the total number of cases for a given day.

I am restricted the charts to show values after March 17, 2020 (first date in data set is March 18, 2020). This is when preventative measures started to increase dramatically. In addition, given the small number of cases prior to this date caused great variability in the growth rate and has multiple instances where it’s NA or equal to infinity.

Total Cases and Total Deaths

These show the cumulative total of cases and deaths.

Growth Factor and New Cases

In order to see if the pandemic is slowing down, it is helpful to look at the growth factor and the daily new cases. For both these values; we want to see a decrease in values from day to day - which indicates that less people are getting sick. Recall that a growth factor less than 1 is a positive sign that the growth of cases is slowing down. Growth factor is directly related to new cases - if daily new cases goes now the growth factor is less than 1; if daily cases goes up the growth factor is greater than one. These two charts represent the same information in two differnt ways.

There can be a lot of variability in the daily points - this is due to many different variables. On variable is the availability of tests, cases will go down if there is scarcity of tests and rise dramatically when more tests become available. One way to help get a better sense over the overall trend is by smoothing the data.

New Deaths and Death Percentage

Values for Past Week

Date	Total Cases	New Cases	Growth Factor	Total Deaths	New Deaths	Death Percentage
Mon, May 11, 2020	1,329,799	20,258	0.7910	79,528	734	5.980%
Sun, May 10, 2020	1,309,541	25,612	0.9501	78,794	1,614	6.017%
Sat, May 09, 2020	1,283,929	26,957	0.9502	77,180	1,510	6.011%
Fri, May 08, 2020	1,256,972	28,369	1.1758	75,670	2,239	6.020%
Thu, May 07, 2020	1,228,603	24,128	1.0120	73,431	2,353	5.977%
Wed, May 06, 2020	1,204,475	23,841	1.0552	71,078	2,144	5.901%
Tue, May 05, 2020	1,180,634	22,593	0.9047	68,934	1,252	5.839%